The present invention relates to fleet management systems, and more particularly, to techniques for quickly and efficiently accessing and analyzing database information related to managing a fleet of reservable assets.
A fleet asset management system, such as a vehicle reservation system, typically stores information related to the assets themselves, along with the demands on those assets, within a database. Such information may include asset availability as a function of time, periods of time for which particular assets are to be used (i.e., reserved), and periods of time for which particular assets are free.
A significant number of fleet assets and a significant number of demands on each of those assets can add up to a large amount of information in the database. In order to keep the size of the database relatively small, the information can be stored in the database in a “sparse” format, i.e., in a format that records only the temporal boundaries where data changes.
However, when the information is stored in a sparse format, the information is not particularly easy to understand and interpret. Evaluations of this sparse data can get expensive in terms of processing power required to access the database and process the accessed information.